Accurate mobile robot dead-reckoning with a precision-calibrated fiber-optic gyroscope

This paper describes two methods aimed at improving dead-reckoning accuracy with fiber-optic gyroscopes (FOGs) in mobile robots. The first method is a precision calibration procedure for FOGs, which effectively reduces the il l effects of nonlinearity of the scale-factor and temperature dependency, T he second method is the implementation of an indirect feedback Kalman filte r that fuses the sensor data from the FOG with the odometry system of the m obile robot. The paper also provides experimental results and compares the relative effe ctiveness of the two methods as implemented on a four-wheel drive/skidsteer Pioneer AT mobile robot.